Teacher Aide Pro for Android

I picked up TAP a few months ago as a solution to solve my district’s unrealistic and unreasonable demands to be in constant contact with parents and guardians about their student’s performance. Unfortunately, I’m an English teacher in high school, which means my students - pandemic related - are functionally 7.5th graders. If I spend 1 minute per student on the two assignments per week I’m supposed to produce and give feedback on, then I literally have negative time to spend. The math simply doesn’t work, so - like so many teachers - I’ve been dipping into my weekends since forever. BUT NO MORE! TAP is a one stop shop for all of it. Take attendance in seconds with the click of a button, develop seating charts through a simple and intuitive drag and drop interface, leave substitute attendance sheets and charts with a click and print tool, and - the tool that makes this monthly subscription REALLY worth its salt - the grade tracking and auto-message feature. You can designate a variety of grade categories and common performance indicators and their percentages (so EXCELLENT = 100%, ABOVE AVERAGE = 80%, and so on) across a variety of assignments, and then, WITH THE CLICK OF A BUTTON, email the whole - including any individual or class notes you took on the student - email it to parents on whatever interval you want. This has been a LIFE SAVER for me. I now enjoy my weekends with my wife and kids instead of sending a bunch of stupid emails that parents don’t read anyway. The graphic at the head of each report clearly depicts student performance at a glance, and THAT’S what parents respond to. To really squeeze the most out of this app - especially if you’re teaching English in middle or high school - consider subscribing also to Rubric Scorer 2. The import feature from that app ports grades and rubric descriptions into the assignments folder when you trigger the “Export to TAP” option from RS2. This cuts down on the hours and hours per week I used to spend painstakingly penciling the same comments over and over and over again on student work. Now, flip the script. Give students a visual breakdown of their quality performance, add a series of custom comments for rapid response, and collect the scores in TAP - by the way, RS2 also lets you send PDFs of the completed rubrics to parents and students, so you don’t have to worry about the transfer process. Ultimately, it all gets stored in your email server, so there’s no serious gap in the paper trail. After an initial setup in both apps, the time these two have saved me is in the dozens of hours since February ‘22. I’ve experimented with loads of these apps. The best, closest competitor is iDoceo - and that’s because they have an in-house submission tool, so you can get out from under whatever your district’s LMS is, if it’s burdensome and stupid (like Canvas!). But ultimately that app is just TOO COMPLEX. It can do just about anything that you’d ever want it to do as a teacher, but the setup process is too convoluted to be effective. TAP + RS2 is FAST, EASY, and SUPPORTS THE DEEP WORK OF TEACHING by cutting - literally in half - the amount of clerical nonsense teachers are expected to do by streamlining those processes.

I've really enjoyed using this app so far, but I have a few suggestions to make it even better. For one, I think there should be a togglable dark mode setting. Also, maybe for attendance colors and grade color-coding we should be allowed to pick any point on one of those color wheel thingies, not just one of 10 or 15 options.

Amazing! It works fantastically such a life saver I totally recommend

This was super well thought out for a high school teacher. However, in elementary or homeschooling it would be ideal to be able to edit the class list names.

It’s like the developers of this app covertly observed my classroom for the last 10 years and created a tool to solve all my problems. Want to assign a grade to a group then have that grade populate out to each individual student (and have the grades copy over to Google Classroom)? Done! Want to be able to customize attendance for hybrid learning? Done! Need a place to record comments for random stuff that happens with students on a given day? Done! Need to have two different seating charts? Done! It’s all in here. $2 a month? Take. My. Money.